chris weisman & greg davis - northern songs (cd)

Northern Songs is the blissful sound of Chris Weisman leaving his body and dissolving into the universe; he sounds very free. Greg Davis (electronic music composer, fractal maker) helps the usually obsessive Chris (psychedelic four-tracker, music artist) surrender to the void. The falling away of self is quite literal: Chris recorded a batch of songs, then turned the tapes over to Greg without instructions for completion (there's a special luxurious bath you get to take when you stop deciding). Rather than perfecting the material, Greg's treatments make it radically and beautifully incomplete; the pop song is unmastered, its closed forms opened to nature (this music has no inside and no outside (this guitar solo sounds friendly and tall (these computer sounds are showing me the thing in the tree that makes it alive

You might've heard/there's a crystal under Brattleboro. Yet Chris and Greg also know that radioactive tritium is leaking from the 40 underground pipes beneath the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. In this sense, their music is post-psychedelic: it is Vermont music of peace and patience, but it is not make-believe (the world is scary and darkening; it is also the home of love). We may dwell deeply in moments of imagination (and they are breathtaking) but the lesson is to listen beyond the rainbow space of the headphones (the world is forever changing (music in the expanded field (life is dispersed among the many things (2012 never knows (something gentle may happen
Carl Davulis

all songs written and played by chris weisman & greg davis
except 'it's all too much' which was written by george harrison
ruth garbus plays clarinet on 'we won't survive'

recorded between november 2008 - march 2009 in brattleboro & burlington VT
drawings by ryan storm